Please Hold It Together

Interactive Spatial Installation, 2022

with Kylian Jonkers

* received a nomination for a HKU Award 2022

Please Hold It Together explores what it takes to connect — physically, socially, and emotionally — in a time where distance is often easier than closeness.

The installation is built around a floating, undulating disco ceiling that only activates through collective touch. Participants are invited to stand beneath the ceiling and hold hands. When they do, their bodies complete an electrical circuit. Light begins to move across the mirrored surface, the ceiling ripples, and the space shifts. When the connection breaks, the movement slowly fades away.

The work asks very little, yet a lot. Holding hands is a simple gesture, but one that carries weight. It can feel intimate, awkward, comforting, political, or vulnerable — especially when it involves strangers. Rather than avoiding this tension, Please Hold It Together uses it as its core material.

By translating human connection directly into light and motion, the installation makes togetherness visible. The disco ceiling becomes a responsive surface: it does not exist as spectacle on its own, but only through cooperation. The work cannot be activated individually. It depends on trust, proximity, and shared action.

The choice of a disco ceiling is intentional. Disco culture is rooted in collectivity — bodies moving together, energy circulating, joy emerging through shared presence. By lifting this element out of the club and placing it into an open space, the work reframes togetherness not as entertainment, but as a generative force.

The installation is constructed from upcycled COVID-19 partition panels — materials originally designed to keep bodies apart. Reworking these panels into a structure that only functions through connection adds a quiet layer of reversal: separation becomes the condition for togetherness.

Please Hold It Together creates a temporary community. Strangers briefly become collaborators. Energy flows from body to body, translated into a shared visual response. The work does not offer answers, but proposes a moment — one where connection is not assumed, but actively chosen.